5 best F1 liveries of the 1970s

From one of the five worst decades.

The death of the muscle car. The birth of disco. Polyester. The oil crisis. When it comes to rating the decades, the 1970s are one miserable wasteland of bad fashion—and worse cars. The same mostly goes for motor-racing—you could hardly call the machines of 70s Formula One pretty, what with their clunky lines and weirdly high intake cowls. Half of them look like the main character from Assassin's Creed.

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However, for every "I Love The Night-Life", there's a "Blitzkrieg Bop"; so too can we find a little good in the 1970s racing scene. Here are the best five F1 liveries of the worst decade.

John Player Special Lotus 72

Well, obviously. While the Lotus 72 first launched in the very pretty red, white, and gold of Imperial Tobacco, the Gold Leaf livery is more a color of the late Sixties—Jim Clark's burial shroud. The Lotuses of Peterson and Fittipaldi? Black-ify and add gilt pinstriping. If there's one defense against the charge that the F1 cars of the 1970s were aesthetically painful, wedge-shaped splinters to the eye, it's Ronnie Peterson, all crossed up in a JPS black-and-gold doorstop.

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Martini Brabham BT45

One part Vermouth brand, two parts Alfa Romeo. The red- and light-and-dark-blue stripes of Martini & Rossi are well associated with Porsche's Le Mans racers, but where the 917 leaves us shaken, the Brabham leaves us stirred. Bernie Ecclestone's successful 1976 courtship of Alfa Romeo saw an Italian flat-12 take the place of the Cosworth mill and Rosso Corsa replacing a plain white background. The effect on the visual palette is like blood in the water to a shark. The launch car is especially charming, with twinned air intakes like an assault-mecha's rocket pods.

Elf Tyrrell P34 Cosworth

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For a machine bearing the name of a pointy-eared mythical creature, the six-wheeled Tyrrell P34 is less Tolkien-immortal and more Will-Ferrell-fish-out-of-water. Six wheels? What is this, a racing car for ants? Outlandish. Weird as it was, the insectoid inverted bathtub looked great in French Racing Blue with yellow striping and numbering—and white Goodyear and Elf logos. It seems a funny coincidence that the blue and yellow echoes the colors of Sweden's national flag given the 1-2 Scheckter-Depailler finish by twin P34s at the 1976 Swedish Grand Prix. Come 1977, and Goodyear pulled the plug on the development of the tiny front tires, ending the six-wheeler's short life. Even so, the car and its colors are forever etched into the imagination of everyone's internal nine-year-old.

Marlboro McLaren M23

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Jorge Mario Bergoglio may be the first Argentine pontiff, but he's hardly the first religious leader to come out of South America: I think we all know whom we're talking about. But where the red-and-white Marlboro livery might be best-associated with doomed Adonis Ayrton Senna and the clean-lined MP4 of the late Eighties, it was also the color of the wedge in which James Hunt had six Grand Prix wins, in 1976; also the car in which Gilles Villeneuve debuted at the '77 British Grand Prix. Instantly recognizable, the simple two-tone Marlboro colors are pure flavor country.

Warsteiner Arrows A2

Tucking in just under the turn of the decade, this car looks like Batman's Tumbler after suffering an unfortunate smelting incident. By all accounts a terrible and terrifying car to drive, the A2 nonetheless looks spectacular in the all-gold livery of German beer-maker Warsteiner, as though ready to be dropped from the belly of a B-29 with Chuck Yeager at the controls. Devoid of the usual multicolored excess of the Seventies, the Arrows' uncluttered flanks seemed designed to adhere to the same reinheitsgebot (Bavarian purity law) as its brewery sponsor. It might not have won anything, but it made the competition look like Bud Light Lime.

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